An Efficient Imaging Method for Medium-Earth-Orbit Multichannel SAR-GMTI Systems

Abstract

Medium-Earth-orbit (MEO) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has the advantages of short revisit time and wide coverage, and thus is a potential tool for implementing ground moving target indication (GMTI) tasks. In the paper, aiming at MEO SAR’s problems of low signal-to-noise ratio and limited computation resource, an efficient imaging method is proposed for MEO multichannel SAR-GMTI systems with relatively low resolution. The proposed imaging method is designed with the consideration of both static scenes and ground moving targets, and it can simultaneously correct the range cell migrations of static scenes and multiple moving targets of no Doppler ambiguity. It needs only four Fourier transforms and twice phase multiplications, and thus is computationally efficient. Moreover, moving targets’ signal characteristics, including the azimuth and range displacements and along-track interferometric phase, in the SAR image obtained by the proposed imaging method are figured out. Experimental results validate the proposed imaging method and the theoretical analyses.